Re: GNU/Hurd Oprating system roadmap inquery.

[Brandon Invergo]

"Garreau, Alexandre" <address@hidden> writes:

> But the Hurd is still at development level, and the current try (there
> were —and several still exists— others: GSRC, swbis, stow, etc.) of GNU
> distribution of GNU is GNU Guix

Just to clarify this, as it's a point of confusion (for myself as well,
in the beginning), these projects all do very different things.  Only
Guix has set out from the beginning to be a full-blown, proper package
management system for GNU that is robust enough to base a distro on it. 

- GSRC: while based on a source-based package management system (GAR and
  the GARstow extensions), GSRC is not meant to be a package management
  system itself.  It's simply meant to be a convenient means for
  installing GNU (and only GNU) software.  When I first took over
  maintainership of it, I had some misguided ideas of basing a
  source-based distro on it.  I'm glad I didn't, because Guix is a
  better solution for that, and anyway it would have been outside the
  original purview of the project.  To that end, I removed 3rd party
  packages from GSRC and I now instruct the user to install the packages
  via their distro's package manager.

- swbis: the main role of swbis is for system administrators to easily
  install software on network machines that they administer.  It *would*
  be possible, I think, to base a distro on it, but you would really
  have to twist the tools to do something they weren't meant to do.  For
  example, the user needs ssh access on any system involved, including
  the repository of software you would want to pull from, which doesn't
  make much sense for a distro.  Also, the commands have a pretty
  baroque usage, which would not be ideal for someone managing their own
  system who just wants to install and uninstall things.  Nevertheless,
  I've played around with packaging my software with swbis, to be
  downloaded via http and managed locally via swbis.  It has some nice
  features, but it's not really a package management system in the sense
  that most people think of.

- stow: stow is awesome and I'm a huge fan of it, but again, it's not a
  package management system in the usual sense.  It *can* be used to
  conveniently manage locally built and installed software, but it only
  would handle the ultimate step: putting all the installed bits in the
  right place in a sane way.  Everything before that (downloading,
  unpacking, configuring, building, and DESTDIR installing) is handled
  manually by the user.

- sourceinstall: now retired in favor of Guix and GSRC, sourceinstall
  was a means of automating installation of packages that are
  distributed with the standard GNU build system (or some facsimile of
  it: as long as it supports configure && make && make install).  Again,
  this wouldn't make a solid foundation for a full distro, especially
  since not all software uses the GNU standard build system, but it was
  simply a means of managing locally installed software on top of an
  existing system.

I hope that clears it up.

-brandon

-- 
Brandon Invergo
http://brandon.invergo.net

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